Christine van den Hemel, 95 [1], shared her family's experiences of survival and loss during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies.
Her testimony provides a rare personal account of the intersection between colonial occupation in Indonesia and the atomic bombings in Japan. It highlights the systemic nature of forced labor that spanned across the Japanese Empire during the 1940s.
Born on Java to a Dutch father and a Javanese mother, van den Hemel said life was wonderful before the war [1]. That stability ended when the Japanese military began its occupation in 1942 [1]. During this period, the Japanese military detained her father, who later died [1].
Van den Hemel said the occupation was terrible. She recounted a story her father told her about laborers who were thrown into the sea after they finished digging trenches [1]. The destruction extended to her home, where she noted that the ceiling was gone and everything was lost [1].
The trauma followed her into her marriage. Her husband, Van Menxel, was among those subjected to forced labor by the Japanese military. He was working at a shipyard in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped on Aug. 9, 1945 [1, 2].
Van den Hemel survived the era of conflict, but the memories of her father's death and her husband's encounter with the nuclear blast remain central to her history. Her account emphasizes the wide geographic reach of the military policies that led to forced labor and civilian casualties across Asia [1].
“"Everything was gone. The ceiling of the house was gone, and really everything was lost."”
This account links two distinct theaters of World War II: the occupation of Southeast Asia and the strategic bombing of Japan. By connecting the forced labor in Indonesia to the atomic bombing in Nagasaki, the testimony illustrates how the Japanese imperial administration's labor policies displaced people across thousands of miles, placing foreign nationals in the direct path of nuclear warfare.
